The Guardian's Second Screen: your indispensable London 2012 companion

Live blog updates, tweets from our experts' network, superb pictures, and results as they happen – all in a beautiful sliding interface accessible on Desktop, Android tablet and iPad.
The Guardian Second Screen offers a completely different way to soak up the Olympics

The Guardian's Second Screen: your indispensable London 2012 companion

Live blog updates, tweets from our experts' network, superb pictures, and results as they happen – all in a beautiful sliding interface accessible on Desktop, Android tablet and iPad.
The Guardian Second Screen offers a completely different way to soak up the Olympics

Friday 27 July 2012 13.36 EDT
First published on Friday 27 July 2012 13.36 EDT

In the North Greenwich Arena, the women's gymnastics has just started. A minute later, across the river, Sir Chris Hoy takes to the velodrome. Suddenly a string of tweets arrives from Top of the D, a specialist hockey blog, about a shock development. A minute later a gorgeous picture – taken by the award-winning sports photographer Tom Jenkins – drops off the Eton Dorney rowing venue.

How to keep up with the flood of Olympic developments, especially while you're watching the television? Enter the Guardian Olympics Second Screen, a web destination for Android tablet, iPad and desktop which brings all manner of Olympics-related news together in one, rolling stream – easily navigable via a beautiful, sliding interface.

From the wit and insight of the Guardian's Olympics live blogging team, to a 100-plus network of experts – from all 26 disciplines – who'll be joining us via Twitter, to the Guardian picture desk's ingenious eye for the best images, every result as it happens and a medal table that updates every 15 minutes, we hope the Second Screen becomes an indispensable companion for you over the next two weeks.

You can turn different types of update – live blog posts, tweets, pictures, and results – off and on as you please, hop back in time to see what was going on earlier in the day, and have new updates fed in immediately in "Live" mode.

And thanks to a custom "Twitter mining" engine that our friends at the University of St Andrews have developed for us, a feature of which we're particularly proud, the Second Screen will give you an overall sense of the level of Twitter activity about the Olympics at any point in time.

That means that if Twitter "kicks off" about the Olympics – as happened on the day of the opening ceremony when the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, appeared on the Today programme, and you happened to miss it, you can instantly jump to that point in time to see what the fuss was about.

The Second Screen itself is actually a web page that is constantly updating, so if you're using it on a tablet, make sure you "Save to Home Screen" so you can fire it up directly and enjoy a rich, full-screen experience.

That's about it. We're more than happy with what we've built for V1.0 but improvements will be rolled out in the weeks ahead. So, as ever, we'd love to know what you think. Please tell us in comments below, which we'll be monitoring for feedback.